Video by Dennis Palacios
Sara Losey has been a member of Girls Scouts since the second grade. In alignment with the organization’s pillar of citizenship, the Irving High School senior has devoted more than 600 community service hours.
A bulk of that came through Losey’s efforts to build a food pantry at Northgate United Methodist Church in Irving.
“This church has done a lot for the community,” she says. “We decided to fix their food pantry. They had it, but it couldn’t really be used anymore.”
So Losey, her mother and other fellow Girl Scouts set out to revamp it. From taking the carpet out and scraping the popcorn ceiling, to painting the walls and learning from a carpenter how to build shelves, the pantry received a total makeover. Losey then led efforts to collect the food to stock the shelves.
Now, items are replenished with donations from grocery stores (as coordinated by Losey) and the church’s congregation.
With that venture in motion, Losey is now focused on creating women’s, men’s and children’s clothes closets at the church.
And while those are some of her cornerstone undertakings, Losey finds random ways to serve her community. Handing out Thanksgiving leftovers to gas station workers and collecting pillows, blankets and gloves to disperse to the homeless to name a few.
This is all in addition to a schedule loaded with college-level classes, serving as vice president of her school’s student council and her involvement as a varsity cheerleader.
The drive?
“Just seeing that I’m helping others is the motivation for me,” she says. “I can give a couple of hours, and it’s benefiting someone extremely from the little work I did. I like that you get to help the community, and you get to meet a lot of different people that you would’ve normally never met before. My favorite thing is to be able to help my community and give back.”
■
The Food Pantry is open Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. For hours, call the church at 972-252-8519.
